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Jonathan Zittrain: 'Digital books are under the control of distributors rather than readers'

This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

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Ray Bradbury's dystopian classic about censorship was titled Fahrenheit 451 after the temperature at which paper burns. But today we should be just as concerned about Fahrenheit 72: text can now be obliterated in a moment at room temperature.

Civil libertarians and consumer advocates call it "digital book-burning": censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books in electronic formats. Although we haven't yet seen the ebook equivalent of government-orchestrated bonfires or private citizens putting "obscene" books to the torch, there is a worrisome trend as we've moved to the cloud.

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Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries. Though you can read a book through, say, Google Books, or on a Nook or Kindle, it's laborious to save what you see to your computer and truly make the book your own.

With cloud-based services, one "master" copy of the book is always online, but that makes it vulnerable to manipulation or even deletion.

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Search results disappeared from Amazon, the publisher no longer offered electronic versions and unsold print copies were removed from bookstores. Alone, a publisher's decision to withdraw a flawed book isn't a threat to speech. But it highlights a technological capability -- Poof! A book disappears -- that could be. Anyone with claims of copyright infringement, defamation, plagiarism or obscenity now has a powerful new tool to compel the full or partial retraction or alteration of a book. Even the mere threat of a lawsuit could pressure authors to digitally alter or retract what they've written.

Purchasing and downloading a book on to your e-reader won't necessarily protect it from disappearing. In 2009, Amazon realised that copies of 1984 that had been sold through the Kindle platform at 99 cents each turned out to be still under copyright rather than, as the independent ebook publisher had thought, in the public domain. Amazon panicked and deleted the famed book about information control from the Kindle of each person who had obtained it. A minor furore ensured and Amazon apologised, promising not to act in such a way again. But the path is now clear for others to insist that Amazon does exactly what it did with 1984. Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies. But the problem is not exclusive to these versions -- rather, any device that is tethered to the cloud could have its contents changed at the request of a publisher, author or angry subject.

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To meet these challenges, libraries should be given an opportunity to escrow copies of publicly available but still all-too-controllable texts. They can compare their own banked copies with what's currently on offer to the public, looking for changes to the integrity of texts. And, once purchased, readers themselves ought to be able to back up and lend their texts, just as with regular books.

That way, those who want to censor will have to resort once again to the torch. If we're going to alter or destroy our past, we should have to see, hear and smell the paper burning.

Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet& Society, also at Harvard

This article was first published in the July 2013 issue of WIRED magazine